Erotic Computing

EC 2.3 (10-7-94)

by Douglas Davis, Ph.D.

Time's passed, and now it seems
Ever'body's havin' them dreams.
Dylan

In Webster's 1.12 I confessed my belief
that the digital diary, with evolving search tools and multimedia
markup capabilities, would not only get us back to Woodstock (I or
II) but also give each of us the kind of handle on our personal
psychology that seems to me the ultimate game. I take as my model for
such a self-examination Freud's preoccupation with his own dreams a
century ago, and the hermeneutic miracle -- his 1900
Interpretation
of Dreams -- that resulted. One seeks re-entry into the
terrain of one's dreams (cf. Adventure) at peril both of making no
sense of the strange doings found there and of making a
different sense than the mental events that gave rise to the
dream -- but the process of recalling, recording, and associating to
the images of the dream is fertile ground for self-understanding,
IMHO. In my search these past few days for another example of the
kind of "erotic" involvement with personal information systems around
which I've been spinning these columns, I retrieved the following,
from a diary file:

May 5, 1990: Amazing laptop dream:

I was in some kind of camp or conference setting
with a group that may have been [an interdisciplinary professional
society to which I belong].[1] In the first image
it seemed to be evening, and I entered a small room (it seemed my
wife was behind me) and saw several people I seemed to recognize. One
was K.L., and she stood up to greet me. She was very old and stooped.
I hugged her, and wondered why I was acting
fond.[2] Then I talked briefly with a very short,
buxom black woman whom I wondered (after we'd exchanged friendly
greetings) whether I really knew.

A new scene had me in a large dining room, apparently waiting
for lunch.[3] I moved one of several tables and
helped arrange some place settings. I sat down at the left of several
other people whom I apparently didn't know. The place across from me
was empty, but Bob S. walked up and sat down after turning quickly to
look behind him. I greeted him (seemed we hadn't seen each other in
quite a while, yet there was no real surprise) and commented that
he's always had that gesture of looking behind him, which I said --
joking for the others at the table -- was like a swordsman glancing
around to make sure someone wasn't about to slip a dagger into his
ribs.[4]

In a third scene I was outside in what seemed a mountainous
setting, maybe with picnic tables. Many other people around, some
Haverford colleagues. I had the T1000SE[5] with
me, was eager to show it off. I started it up, then seemed to be away
from it, looked back to see John B and someone else fiddling with it.
John had the top folded all the way back and seemed to be looking
down on a bunch of lights as he worked the keyboard. I was a little
concerned, then was holding the machine, apparently to demonstrate
Tetris. I opened the top, and it was partly detached. I was
worried/angry, was able to rehook two curved plastic protrusions at
either end of the screen section. I saw that the screen and white
plastic were covered with scrawled writing in pencil. I was furious
(though I realized I could probably erase the writing), knew John was
responsible, and called over (he was with several others some
distance away) angrily asking who did this. He called back
nonchalantly that [some common chemical] would easily take off the
writing.

Then I was looking at the screen, which had Tetris but in a
much more complicated, jet-black on shiny white display. The game
seemed to have a large number of variants accessed by pressing the
arrow keys. One gave a second simultaneous game
display[5] with much more elaborate block shapes
rapidly forming, others seemed like animated cartoon adventures. One
may have been a harem scene, and finally I found one that had German
writing on the screen and seemed to be set in Nazi Germany. After
several scenes with soundtrack in German or accented English I was
watching an elaborate race of two lines of old cars through a forest.
I seemed able to control one of the cars with my arrow keys, and I
tried speeding up and slowing down. The commentary was like a race
announcer, and I deliberately sped up so that I was likely to crash.
I apparently did, to excited commentary, then found myself on a steep
mountainside. I was sprawled on a narrow track or path, was worried
about sliding down. I realized that this was still part of the game
display, and that I could probably <esc> from it at any time.
As I wondered what to do I noticed a stone marker to my right, on
which was a number over 200,000. This seemed to be my game score, and
I realized it was very high but that this was because I had left the
game running by itself for quite a while.

Suddenly, at paragraph four, I seem to have slipped into the
gizmo. The sensation was uncanny, and exciting. I was fascinated by
this dream four years ago when it occurred, and I read it then to
several people as an example of the interplay of my fascination with
computers and with dreams. Until I was thinking about this column
yesterday, however, I did not connect the dream with a marvelous book
I had read three months before (as I learned from a search of my
diaries), viz.

Hardison, O.B. (1989). Disappearing through the skylight:
Culture and technology in the twentieth century. New York:
Viking.

If an innovation is basic, simply because it is so,
a generation after it has been introduced, it becomes part of the
world as given -- part of the shape of consciouness, you might say,
rather than the content of consciousnes (Hardison, 1989, p. xii).

Hardison was until his recent death University Professor at
Georgetown University and a founding member of the Quark Club, which
the book jacket describes as "a group of scientists and humanists
interested in cultural change." His marvelously fertile meander
across 20th century art, architecture, Dadaist poetry, quantum
physics, fractal mathamatics, and computer science provided me with a
metaphor I love: of a piece of human consciousness and selfhood
disappearing through the small window of the screen, as the
technology becomes increasingly "transparent to thought." Chapter 29
("Adventure") is especially fine, with its segue from the branching
text game to an imagined hypertext markup of Shakespeare's Tempest. I
have recalled as I write these notes that I took Hardison's book with
me to the February, 1990, meeting connected with the first scene of
the dream, and read the last chapters about hypertextuality on the
plane ride back across the country.

In my day job, teaching bright undergraduates the psychodynamic psychology
Freud invented in the late 1890s, I treat his 1900 classic The Interpretation
of Dreams as both the one essential Freud text and the well-spring of modern
(and postmodern) hermeneutic psychology. Each
of his own dreams illustrates the hypertexual richness, the open-endedness,
and therefore the "erotic" charge, of these daily steps through the looking
glass; and none is really "interpreted" in the sense we bring to Freud
-- translated in to a univocal statement in a mundane idiom.

[1]This society meets every February -- usually in
a warm climate -- and provides a welcome relief from Pennsylvania
winters. On several occassions I have arrived at the conference hotel
and immediately recognized some of those already clustered around the
bar or reception desk.

[2]It seemed likely on recalling the dream
that KL, a rather difficult colleague several years older than I, had
for some reason been substituted for AV, a much older collegue whom I
regard as a mentor. I had attended the previous February's meeting of
the society to give a paper on Moroccan research done years before,
partly under the sponsorship of AV and her husband.

[3]This scene seemed to me on the
following day to be partly based on a preceding-day lunch at a
psychiatric institute with a psychoanalyst friend and three
colleagues of his. Such meetings often became a setting for me to
show off my knowledge of Freud's early psychoanalytic theorizing.

[4]Bob was one of my closest friends
growing up in rural Minnesota. Smaller than the rest of us, he was
the most pugnacious. I dream of him occasionally in settings
reminiscent of childhood.

[5]My third Toshiba () laptop, with 3M. of static
RAM. The purchase, configuration, and pleasure in using this computer are major
features of my 1990 diary.

[6]Some of this probably stemmed from
showing my then-13-year-old daughter Deluxepaint the previous day,
and her frustration with the split detail display. We were both
moderately avid Tetris players at that time. John is a somewhat older
faculty colleague with whom I have occasional and friendly -- but not
cordial -- dealings. He does not seem especially interested in
computers.